“Just what the hell are those things?” Mal said. Rhetorical question. She wasn’t expecting Reston to have the answer.
It turned out he did. “Over there.” He pointed to one of the streets that fed onto the concourse. At the corner, lurking, was an old woman with wild white hair and an eager, gloating posture. “That’s Tzitzimitl.”
“So those animals would be…”
“The Tzitzimime.”
The Demons of Darkness. The mindless, rapacious servants of the mother goddess. According to the myths, they were destined one day to overrun the earth and devour all humankind.
Mal felt an old familiar chill creep through her. As a child, she had had nightmares about the Tzitzimime. There’d been one particular textbook at school, a religious primer, which had carried pictures of them, an artist’s pen-and-ink impression of how the demons might look. Those black, leering homunculi had plagued Mal’s sleep for years.
The flesh-and-blood reality was worse still. Uglier and more vicious than even that textbook draughtsman could have imagined.
Most of the Serpent Warriors were on the ground now, shrieking in horror and agony as the Tzitzimime ate them alive. Their suffering filled the old crone with delight. Tzitzimitl clasped her hands and shivered, and now and then did a little stiff-kneed jig on the spot.
“What did I tell you?” Reston said. “She really doesn’t like us.”
It wasn’t long before there were just three Serpents left, and they were attempting to get to the bunker and find sanctuary there, but the Tzitzimime kept cutting them off from the entrance. Every way they turned, there was a pack of the creatures spitting and snarling. They tried feinting at them, but the Tzitzimime simply feinted back. Eventually the Serpents were surrounded, encircled. Their lightning gun batteries were drained and for metres around they could see nothing but squat, quivering bodies and rows of deadly sharp teeth.
They were done for and they knew it. One of them made a proposal to the other two. All three drew their macuahitl s.
“Those won’t be any use,” Reston commented.
“I don’t think that’s what they’re up to,” said Mal.
She was right. The three Serpents formed themselves into a triangle. Each held up his sword point-first at the chest of the man on his right. Then one gave the command and they drove the swords home. All three fell, as one, and the Tzitzimime scampered onto the fresh corpses and feasted.
A sharp, loud whistle from Tzitzimitl had the Tzitzimime pricking their ears and raising their gore-streaked muzzles. A second whistle, and they abandoned their meals and hurried towards her, a great flowing carpet of low-slung bony beast. They assembled at the goddess’s ankles, clambering over one another and fawning for her attention. Tzitzimitl gave them all a gracious smile, patted a few heads, then set off with the Tzitzimime trotting behind her in a long obedient line, onwards to whatever atrocity she planned next.
“She bred them, didn’t she?” Mal said. “Trained them. Made them.”
“I’d guess so.”
“They were little bits of this and that. A bunch of different animals put together.”
“I think these gods can do things human scientists can only dream of. Manipulate genetics. Splice elements of one creature into another. You should see Xolotl. He’s half dog, half man, but it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
“So that’s another gift they didn’t give us: how to tamper with nature.”
“Do you think it would have done us any good to have it? Or, no, put it this way — do you think we’d have done any good with it?”
“No.”
“Exactly. On the plus side, Tzitzimitl has at least given you and me something.”
Mal surveyed the concourse, now little more than an abattoir. “A clear run to that bunker.”
“So what are we waiting for?” said Reston.
TWENTY-NINE
Same Day
They picked their way across the concourse, around the heaps of slain Serpent Warriors. Here and there lay the charred body of a Tzitzimime. Mal found the creatures far harder to look at than the mutilated human remains; they were unnatural things, hideous and insidious. She steered clear of them as best she could. One, still just alive, snapped feebly at her ankle as she passed. She considered running it through with her macuahitl, but she liked the idea of the animal suffering a lingering death, and she didn’t want its blood besmirching her blade.
The sky was alive with explosions. Again and again the darkness was lit up by a bright flash, followed by a long resonant boom. Tenochtitlan was taking a pounding, but it was also dishing one out in return. An aerodisc streaked overhead in pursuit of an armoured god, blazing away with its lightning guns. The sound of street skirmishes echoed between the buildings.
The bunker entrance was sealed by a pair of broad, heavy doors, secured by a chunky combination lock.
“Any guesses as to the code?” Reston said.
“Search me.”
“Then we’ll just have to use the universal lockpick — brute force.” He went and fetched two of the Serpents’ l-guns that still carried some juice. Handing one to Mal, he said, “Aim for the middle, the gap where the doors meet. Full charge.”
Standing well back, they zapped the doors repeatedly until the guns ran dry. When the smoke and their vision cleared, they found that they had created a gap just large enough for a person to squeeze through. They waited a minute or so for the twisted edges of the hole to cool; when the metal was still hot to the touch but not burningly so, they slithered inside.
A trapezoidal tunnel stretched ahead, illuminated at intervals by caged lightbulbs and descending at a shallow gradient. They proceeded down it, alert for danger. Every so often the walls around them shook as yet another building above them took a hit.
The tunnel disgorged into a huge chamber. A dozen suits of Serpent armour stood in rows, mounted on purpose-built modules. There were scores of empty modules for all the suits currently in deployment in the field. Weaponry hung on racks. A small team of technicians were checking the equipment, running battery tests and diagnostic workups. They were obviously doing their best to ignore the noises coming from above, busying themselves with tasks so as not to have to think about the devastation being wrought on their city. Anxiety was etched on every face; shoulders were hunched, voices were strained.
She and Reston were not spotted coming in. They ducked behind a workbench strewn with random pieces of armour. There, in whispers, they debated their next move. Reston proposed taking one of the technicians hostage and using him as a bargaining tool to force the rest of them to get two suits ready. “They can tell us how to activate them, how to fly them, everything.”
“You think they’ll go for that?”
“Look at them. They’re scared out of their wits. These are civilians, not soldiers. They don’t want to die.”
“Okay. But this had better work.”
Mal drew her macuahitl and stole across the floor to the nearest technician, a thin, bespectacled and extremely gawky young specimen. Coming up behind him, she put the blade to his neck and said quietly in his ear, “Do not scream. Do not panic. Just do as I say and I promise you won’t get hurt. Nod if you understand.”
He did.
“There are two of us,” she went on, “and we want two of those suits of armour. You and the other boffins set them up for us, get us into them, and instruct us on what to do with them. Help us out, and this can all be over with in no time. Yes?”